Picture Book

Sanctuary; 2008

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Any attempt to offer an authoritative overview of the Kinks' career is fraught with difficulty. During the band's long run from 1962 through 1996, the Davies brothers and their abettors never morphed into a nostalgia act, continually changing and writing new material to create a varied but distinctive body of work. The variation isn't only stylistic, either-- their catalog varies a lot in quality as well. The Kinks' work from 1966 through 1970 is basically unimpeachable, but opinions differ widely on what came after, and for good reason. So in constructing a six-disc look at the band's vast catalog, the challenge becomes to adequately represent each of the its phases while balancing considerations of what's actually worthwhile.

Picture Book answers this challenge through a capricious, sometimes puzzling track selection, which was assisted by Ray Davies. It's a (mostly) chronological jumble of singles, album tracks, alternate mixes, mono versions, live cuts, rarities, hits, misses, and even a couple demos and one rehearsal. Two-thirds of the material is familiar album and single tracks, though, meaning that hardcore fans hoping for a bonanza will ultimately find about two discs worth of stuff they don't have or previously found difficult to get, some of which are hard-to-distinguish mono mixes. Then there's the matter of who actually wants a box that covers the band's whole career but leaves out tons of the band's best tracks and has a sixth disc that's mostly awful.

The set starts with BBC announcer Brian Matthew introducing the band before "You Really Got Me" rips into rock'n'roll and takes out a lasting bite with its brutal slashed-amp distortion and stupid-simple riff. The 1964 song put the band firmly on the map-- it was a UK #1 and a Top Ten hit in the U.S.-- but it was actually their third single. Here, it's followed a few tracks later by their first, a cover of "Long Tall Sally" that justifiably went nowhere. Omitted is their second single, the superb and infectiously melodic flop "You Still Want Me", which was thankfully included on Essential's 1998 remaster of the band's self-titled debut.

The period from 1964 through 1971 covers the first three discs and spills onto the fourth, which is as good an assessment as any of the band's best and most creative period. The run of albums from 1966's Face to Face through Something Else and Village Green Preservation Society to 1969's Arthur, or the Decline And Fall of the British Empire is a spectacular four-LP run that established Ray Davies as one of the keenest observers of British society and cemented the band's influence and legacy. It's hard to go wrong skipping around the first few discs of this set, though the rough demo of "Dead End Street" and the twice-aborted rehearsal of "Come on Now" are poor substitutes for the familiar versions.

A host of non-album tracks make this section particularly rewarding. "Autumn Almanac" is practically a blueprint for XTC, the radio session version of Dave Davies' overlooked and excellent "Love Me Till the Sun Shines" burns with sharp intensity, Dutch B-side "This Is Where I Belong" was justly included on Kink Kronikles and sounds no less vital here, and the haunting piano-and-vocal cast-off "I Go to Sleep" is simply gorgeous. Early outtakes "A Little Bit of Sunlight" and "This I Know" also hit the British Invasion sweet spot. It's a crime that the band was kept out of the U.S. by an American Federation of Musicians ban during its most creative period, but the band became so quintessentially English during that period that it's possible American audiences wouldn't have been receptive anyway.

The Kinks' golden era extended into the 70s with the Lola Vs Powerman & the Moneygoround and Muswell Hillbillies LPs, which are amply represented. It's also nice to hear three tracks from the soundtrack to the comedy Percy, which has long been treated like a bastard child in the band's discography. "The Way Love Used to Be" is an especially great song, a dark, moody ballad sweetened by lush orchestration. The Muswell album found Ray Davies taking a break from incisively and sympathetically critiquing British society to instead indulge a little second-hand Americana. Bassist Peter Quaife had exited the band in 1969, and the Davies brothers and drummer Mick Avory had expanded the band to include a full-time keyboardist-- John Gosling's warm Hammond organ and tack piano deepened the Americanness of songs like "Muswell Hillbilly" and "20th Century Man". "Alcohol", presented here in a live version, echoes some of the music hall traditions that would become the band's staple reference point in the mid-70s.

During the Kinks' time at RCA in the 70s, Ray Davies indulged in a series of poorly received concept albums that don't wear nearly as well today as the band's 60s output, but there are quite a few gems hidden away in this period, which comprises the bulk of Disc Four. The two-part would-be rock opera Preservation had an endearingly rough sound (it was some of the first material recorded at the band's own Konk studios), but the inclusion of female backing vocalists and a horn section in the band didn't always add much to the songs. The other two albums from this period, Soap Opera and Schoolboys in Disgrace, a sequel to Preservation that focused on the villain, Mr. Flash, are scantly represented with three total tracks, but the choices are inspired: Soap Opera's "Holiday Romance" is a wonderful music hall throwback with hints of Noel Coward, while the loan Schoolboys track, "No More Looking Back", is a cinematic preview of 90s Britpop, from Dave's harmonized lead guitar intro to Ray's perceptive lyrics about the way people who've left us linger in strange ways. If this set were more interested in telling the story of the band, it probably would have also included "The Hard Way", a heavy track that anticipated the band's late-70s shift to slick hard rock and became a concert staple.

The band's six hard rock albums for Arista, released from 1977 through 1984, represent their most misunderstood period. Some fans of the band's 60s output dismiss it entirely, and it's certainly not up to that standard, but very little is. They experienced their biggest success in the U.S. during this period (1979's Low Budget, at #11, was their highest-charting US album), and they were at the peak of their concert drawing power, touring almost constantly back and forth across the Atlantic. Oddly, they were making corporate rock just as their old music returned to vogue as inspiration for British punks, with the Jam covering "David Watts". There is a fair amount of good stuff on these albums, but you have to dig more for it, and not all of it is here. The two biggest omissions are "Juke Box Music" and "Around the Dial", which is sort of an old crank's companion to Elvis Costello's "Radio Radio".

Some of what has been included just misses the mark. Low Budget in particular is crammed with lame songs like "Attitude", a terrible diatribe that's the exact opposite of the empathetic, detailed storytelling Ray Davies excels at. Even some of the better songs from this period, like the slow character study "Rock and Roll Fantasy", lack the wit and insight of "Two Sisters" and "Sunny Afternoon". "Destroyer", though, is a slaying, rambunctious rock track that revisits Ray's encounter with Lola the next day to hilarious effect. The band is also effective on "Sleepwalker" and "Misfits", nicely summing up modern alienation on the latter with the line "Take a real good look around. The misfits are everywhere." The relative rarities form this period are mostly lackluster. The ebulliently nostalgic storytelling of "Come Dancing" is here as a weak demo, while "Maybe I Love You" is an inconsequential nothing from the scrap heap. "Nuclear Love" is an enjoyable excursion into near-New Wave but hardly essential.

As the band's Arista deal wrapped up with Word of Mouth in 1984, they were already falling back out of commercial favor (they'd never really returned to it in the UK), and long-simmering tension between Dave Davies and Mick Avory led to the drummer's exit, much to Ray's dismay. Most of Disc Six is given to the post-Avory era, when the band wandered in the commercial wilderness, recording weak hard rock albums that are scarcely worth summarizing with a track or two, much less hearing in their entirety. The studio leftover "Million Pound Semi-Detached" is the most charming thing from that period included here, in part because it sounds like it was recorded at Konk in the mid-70s, but also because Ray's wit has returned in its tale of a couple buying a house, raising a family, and generally living the dream, only to find that the dream left out all the boredom and frustration. It was their best comment on the State of British Life since Dave's post-Empire lament "Living on a Thin Line", from 1984.

The set wraps up with the final Kinks material, from 1993's Phobia and their last record, the hodgepodge To the Bone. Bizarrely, there are five songs from Phobia, and not one of them is "Hatred (A Duet)", the only truly great Kinks song from the band's final decade together. That song features Dave and Ray satirizing their own famously stormy working relationship, but the songs here don't even approach that level of humor or humanity. It's little wonder that hardly anyone noticed when the band split in 1996.

Perhaps the ultimate drawback of covering the Kinks' entire oeuvre on one set is the need to tack on songs from their most irrelevant records. It's difficult to discern precisely who the audience for this set is-- the band's hardcore fans will appreciate most of the rarities, but this is not a catch-all for Kinks odds and sods, and the sheer volume of material that any true fan already owns means that the set is a pricey way to get what rarities there are. If you're new to the band and absolutely require a career overview before going straight to the essential late-60s albums, Castle's Ultimate Collection, which covers up to 1984, is a much more solid introduction.